When Eurocommunism and Socialism was first published in English in 1978, the immediate political future of much of Western Europe was dominated by the prospect of the entry of mass Communist Parties into government. What would this have meant for state and society in such countries as France, Italy or Spain; and what would it have meant for the nature of Communist Parties themselves? Fernando Claudín, author of the most important recent work on the history of the international communist movement from Lenin to Khruschev, was himself a Spanish Communist for 30 years. A veteran of the Civil War and of underground work in Spain after it, Claudín also lived for many years in Moscow, and was a member of the Executive Committee and of the Secretariat of the PCE during its long exile. Today in his new book, Claudín sets the phenomenon of 'Eurocommunist' in its historical perspective, at once in the social crisis of the capitalist world during the 70's and the developing crisis in the relations between the USSR and the Western Communist Parties since the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Arguing that there is no other possible road to socialism in the West than that of genuine democracy, he criticizes the official positions of the Communist Parties from a sympathetic yet independent standpoint. Carefully documenting the course of each of the parties over the past decade, he questions their residual silences and ambiguities over repression in Eastern Europe, and their velleities of compromise with capital in Western Europe - particularly marked, he suggests, in Italy. At the same time, Claudín emphasises the historic significance of the break represented by Eurocommunist with the whole past practice of Stalinism, and the new perspectives of liberation it potentially allows for the working class in the West.

Macron is the name of a crisis of any politics that purports to "represent" political orientations in an electoral space. That clearly owes to the fact that the earthly disappearance of the communist hypothesis and its parties has little by little made the truth about parliamentarism apparent: namely, that ultimately it only "represents" small nuances in the dominant consensus around neoliberal capitalism — and not any alternative strategy. The far Right, in the brutal style of Donald Trump or the renovated Pétainism of Marine Le Pen, profits from this situation, since although it stands totally within that consensus it is alone in giving off the appearance of being on the outside.

It is thecontradictions of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as it was beginning to develop in Russia, that form the object of Lenin's analysis and of his arguments. If you forget this fact, you can easily fall into dogmatism and formalism: Leninism can be represented as a finished theory, a closed system — which it has been, for too long, by Communist parties. But if on the other hand you remain content with a superficial view of these contradictions and of their historical causes, if you remain content with the simplistic and false idea according to which you have to "choose" between the standpoint of theory and that of history, real life and practice, if you interpret Lenin's arguments simply as a reflection of ever changing circumstances, less applicable the further away they are in history, then the real causes of these historical contradictions become unintelligible, and our own relation to them becomes invisible. You fall into the domain of subjective fantasy